AMANPOUR: A tug of war over the Constitution. The 200-year-old
document that still inspires people all over the world. It's a
reflection of America's past and its promise, and it's now at the heart
of a fierce political debate. We examine the cornerstone of the U.S.
government and the American dream, making sense of the melting pot as
the country of immigrants grapples with tough times.

And then the dream deferred.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Everything was so insecure from what I
thought. Everything changed.

AMANPOUR: As the rich get richer, millions of Americans are finding
hope harder to come by. They're down, but not out.

AMANPOUR: Live from the Newseum in Washington, "This Week" with
Christiane Amanpour, starts right now.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: Welcome to our special Independence Day edition of the
program from the night studio of the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

This week, focus on the founders. With Washington tied up in knots,
thousands of American troops fighting overseas, and millions of citizens
struggling to get by, we go back to the original blueprint of this
democracy, the Constitution. A document that endures and guides the
United States and is now at the heart of a fierce political battle to
define just what this country stands for. Here's ABC's John Donvan.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN DONVAN, ABC NEWS: The original lives under glass, has no price
tag, is the world's oldest operative Constitution at 223 years, and it's
shortest in written length, 4,400 not entirely correctly spelled words
-- sorry, Pennsylvania. And while it's our habit to speak of it in
reverential terms--

RONALD REAGAN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It is a covenant
we've made not only with ourselves but with all of mankind.

DONVAN: In holy language.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: It provides a compass that can help us find
our way.

DONVAN: Here's the other way we've long tended to treat the
Constitution -- as wrapping paper, as in wrap yourself in it to make
your case sound even better type of wrapping paper, to put a nice bow on
it. Which is really nothing new. Every case that ever gets to the
Supreme Court gets there because both sides argue they have the
Constitution on their side. Richard Nixon, refusing to give up his
tapes, said the Constitution protected him. He lost. Folks that want
to burn the American flag say the Constitution protects them. They
generally win. People who argue the Constitution protects the unborn
have yet to win their battle.

The point is, the Constitution, which we think of as a set of rules,
is really a departure point for a good, strong argument about the
details. The details of who we are as a nation and what we stand for.
Although this year, since the Tea Party arrived in force in the halls of
Congress and actually launched its tenure with the reading of the
Constitution--

REP. JOHN A. BOEHNER (R-OHIO), HOUSE SPEAKER: We the people of the
United States.

DONVAN: The argument has become a more big picture thing. The Tea
Party arguing that the country has slipped its constitutional moorings
in a wholesale way.

REP. MICHELE BACHMANN, R-MINN.: I believe in the founding fathers'
vision of a limited government.

DONVAN: It's an argument that income taxes and the Federal Reserve
and government-guarantee health care and a government that just keeps on
growing is not at all what was intended by the framers of the
Constitution, those guys whose intellectual garb they honor at their
rallies by literally garbing themselves just as they did. We need to go
back to what they believed in, is the argument. But who is to agree on
what that actually means?

HERMAN CAIN, GOP PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We need to reread the
Constitution and enforce the Constitution. There's a little section in
there that talks about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

DONVAN: Actually that's not Constitution, that's the Declaration of
Independence.

Lots of people seem to mix them up.

OBAMA: Drawing on the promise enshrine in our Constitution, the
notion that we're all created equal.

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, HISTORIAN: It's a very slippery slope to start
cherry-picking your favorite golden oldie from the founding fathers and
slapping it on to political speeches today. Democrats and Republicans
quote from the founding fathers, but we shouldn't act like they were
somehow omnipotent.

DONVAN: The reality is that the framers, posed in paintings as
though frozen on an American canvas, they were not gods. They were
guys, guys who didn't give women the vote and who let slavery stand for
the time being, and who, by the way, were trying to create at the time a
stronger central government -- of course not too strong -- leaving to us
a Constitution that we could fix as needed. Sorry, make that amend,
which we've now done 27 times.

BRINKLEY: When you look at the founding documents of our country,
they are elastic. They are meant to be pulled and bent in different
directions as each era dictates.

DONVAN: So, today, right now, as we argue over whether it's
constitutional for the president to send drones over Libya, for the
government to make immigrants carry I.D. cards, for Congress not to
raise the debt ceiling, which could mean the nation defaults, those
arguments are only possible in a sense because there is a Constitution.
As the framers wrote in its very first paragraph, they wanted to secure
the blessings of liberty for our posterity -- that's us, we, the
people. We are still here, thanks to them and this piece of paper.

For "This Week" I'm John Donvan in Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: So, as we have just seen, now more than ever, the
Constitution is at the very heart of the political debate these days,
and Congress is now requiring that every piece of legislation come
accompanied by its constitutional justification. And the Tea Party is
demanding a return to the kind of government that the framers
envisioned. But just what did those men who lived 200 years ago really
want? Joining me now for a discussion of truth and myth -- George Will,
Michael Eric Dyson of Georgetown University. Harvard University history
professor Jill Lepore, who is also the author of "The Whites of Their
Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History,"
and Richard Stengel, editor in chief of "Time" magazine and writer of
the cover story on the Constitution, "Does It Still Matter?"

Thank you all for being here. Let me start with you, George. How
do you explain the ubiquity of the Constitution today as a real living
piece of political debate?

WILL: Well, first of all, American politics always has a
retrospective cast, always looking back to the Declaration and the
Constitution. All of our arguments get litigated through these
documents. Did Jefferson have the power to make the Louisiana
purchase? James Madison, his successor, the architect of the
Constitution, vetoed an internal improvements bill because he thought
that went beyond the powers of the federal government, right then to
today, when the most novel new development in our politics, the Tea
Party movement, is named after something that happened in 1773. So
there's a retrospective cast naturally built into our politics.

But what has happened today is a large number of Americans, this one
included, believe that the somewhat promiscuous expansion of government
power in recent years raises questions about whether we still have a
government of limited, delegated and enumerated powers. That is, is the
Madison project still viable.

AMANPOUR: You say over the last few years. Do you mean
particularly now in the Obama administration?

WILL: Yes.

AMANPOUR: What do you say to that very categoric --

DYSON: Well, I think that this retrospective cast that George Will
refers to is absolutely right. But there's some gaps, some holes,
lacunas, gulfs, abysses. You know, you read the Constitution in the
Congress, but oops, I forgot the part about slavery. You talk about
women and people of color who have been elided, distorted, relegated to
the margins, and altogether seen as marginalia.

I think that the Constitution is a powerful, living, vibrant
document. I think it's been hijacked by people with narrow, vicious and
parochial visions. And I think the assertion that now we, of all
people, this generation is somehow vulnerable to rebuff of the
Constitution is like a Hagelian problem. You think your generation is
the greatest generation, and the apotheosis of history finds its resting
point in you. Slow down.

The point is that the Constitution is durable, it's powerful.
Because of its flexibility, black people and others were able to argue
their way into an American identity and a vision for democracy that
initially they were barred from. So I think that it's powerful.

AMANPOUR: But you do say hijacked by a vicious band of people. Do
you think that's fair? I mean, is that what is going on right now?

LEPORE: I think it's the case that the Constitution has always been
a subject of contest. Each generation of Americans struggles to inherit
the mantle and claim the mantle of both the revolution and of the
Constitution.

What is actually to me been unusual about this political moment, is
that a lot of people are trying to claim both the revolution and the
Constitution. It's usually been more of a kind of an oscillation. The
revolution is more often claimed by the left; the Constitution is more
often celebrated by the right. The Tea Party movement has really
embraced both, and in a certain kind of way collapsed the two, which is
interesting as a historical phenomenon. But it's not -- it's neither
novel nor sinister.

AMANPOUR: Let me go back to George, then. You say that it's become
so important right now, because of what you think is the excesses of the
Obama administration. So you both are saying that it's because of
Barack Obama, but from different positions.

WILL: Yes, that indeed, Mr. Obama has claimed for the federal
government the power to do things that are simply unprecedented. Even
the people who say that the mandates require American citizens as
conditions of living in America to buy health care, no one denies that
that's an unprecedented expansion of federal power.

STENGEL: George, you look at -- I mean, every president expands
federal power. Their view is from where they sit, and the Oval Office
looks pretty great.

George Bush was the greatest exponent of the expansion of executive
power probably in American history, you know, with the exception of
course of FDR and Abraham Lincoln.

So I think the idea that Obama is somehow exceptional in this regard
rather than just a continuation of what the tradition has been is kind
of crazy to me.

I mean, one of the things that the founders did, which I think we
sometimes forget about in this discussion of the founders, you know,
didn't actually create a large federal government. They didn't. What
they created was a very weak executive. I mean, Article 2, about the --
about what the president does is about half the size of Article 1. They
didn't want a very strong executive, because they feared kings. But
pretty much every president since then has been expanding executive
power, and there are all kinds of reasons, both good and bad, for it,
which we can discuss.

AMANPOUR: Jill, as a historian, Rick Stengel brought up the idea of
big government or small government. Didn't the Constitution actually
give more power to a federal government, to a centralized government
after the Articles of Confederation?

LEPORE: It's suggested it's centralized and strengthened the role
of the federal government, especially in reference to the Article of
Confederation, which was a very loose confederation of states, 15
separate currencies, and each state could have its own Navy.

We talk about big government and small government. It's a little
bit hard to do that in the abstract. I mean, the Postal Service in 1790
was six people. I mean, I think it's really easy to get kind of tangled
up in the intensity of our own modern political rhetoric.

WILL: Yes, yes, the framers of the Constitution wanted to
strengthen the federal government, but they knew that government is, A,
necessary, and B, inherently dangerous. And therefore, in the act of
creating a more competent federal government, they sought to limit it.

James Madison, the architect in the definitive commentary on the
Constitution, the Federalist Papers, specifically in Federalist 45,
said, the powers delegated to the federal government by the proposed
Constitution are few and defined. That's either true or it's not.

STENGEL: That is the continuing shift in balance that's been going
on throughout our history.

AMANPOUR: You just raised this. Obviously, two different held
views on the size of government and the strength of the central versus
the state. So, the question then is, is it an absolutist document? Is
it open to interpretation? Is it something that the letter of the law
and the actual words have to be followed today, 200 years later?

WILL: It's one thing to say it's open to interpretation, which it
obviously is. It's very open-textured language. On the other hand, I
mean, when you say unreasonable searches and seizures, what's
reasonable? We argue about that. But to say that the Constitution is a
living, evolving document, as you did, is almost oxymoronic. A
Constitution is supposed to freeze things. It is an anti-evolutionary
device as Justice Scanlon (ph) said. It is intended to put certain
things beyond the reach of transient majorities. That's the language of
Justice Jackson in a famous case.

The point of the Constitution is that majorities are dangerous, and
we have to protect against them. Hence, what Oliver Wendell Holmes
said, if my fellow citizens want to go to hell, I'll help them, because
that's my job. He was saying the Constitution exists to enable
majorities. That's exactly wrong.

DYSON: That's all great on paper, I mean, which is where it's
written. But when it makes the transition from parchment to pavement,
there, again, is the rub. The reality is that that document, when I
talk about it being living and vital, I'm talking about the
interpretation of it, I'm talking about the meaning of it, I'm talking
about the symbolic power of the cache, the purchase of notions of
freedom, justice, equality and democracy. They mean nothing if they are
simply entered in ink. They must travel into our common humanity. And
I'm suggesting that that document is critical to the reinterpretation of
people of color and women. We were rejected into the mainstream of
America. Were it not for some vibrant reinterpretation of that document
and appealing to its living legacy, none of us could be here. I
wouldn't be here talking to you, not as an equal, at least.

STENGEL: One of the misnomers in our society is that most people --
a lot of people confuse the Declaration with the Constitution. The
Declaration is the music. The Constitution is the libretto. And those
values that we cherish are really in the Declaration and they are also,
by the way, in the amendments, I mean, which -- and the Bill of Rights,
which people forget, was not part of the original Constitution.

AMANPOUR: But we're here today, and I want to know what you think
about this, George, and actually Jill as well. We do get a sense,
certainly from the Tea Party, certainly from the big political leaders
now, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin -- she hasn't jumped in but
nonetheless -- they are framing this debate around the Constitution,
that this is a document that is under siege. Is that, do you think it's
under siege?

WILL: Has been for a century. Woodrow Wilson, Crowley (ph), the
rest of the progressive movement, set out to say the Constitution was
all very well once, but now we're a more complicated society with more
grand ambitions for the government, and therefore what the founders did,
which is put the government on a short leash, has to be undone. We have
to cut the leash on government, and that's what the progressive project
has been for a century.

(CROSSTALK)

LEPORE: Therein lies the origins of this particular impasse that we
are in now. I mean, this is a very old impasse. I think the sense of
crisis is grossly exaggerated. We have a very adversarial journalistic
world in which we're going to hear more about crisis than not, but the
framing of that debate does indeed date to the progressive era when
there was a set of arguments made that the document is a document, a
piece of parchment, and it needs to be worshipped as such in the way
that we might worship other documents that have different kinds of
meaning to us in a kind of more epistemological way. That idea goes
much further back, and I think indeed it can in many ways be traced to
the founders themselves. When Jefferson said the Constitution should
never be looked at as the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,
we find other kinds of --

(CROSSTALK)

AMANPOUR: You bring in sort of the religious aspect of it. And,
today, again, it is something that so many people talk about it as if it
was a religious document. There is no word "God" in the more than 4,000
words of the Constitution. Was it -- is it possible to say that it was
divinely inspired, though it does not say--?

STENGEL: The Constitution, again, I go back to the comparison
between the Declaration and the Constitution. The Constitution is a
blueprint for the house. It doesn't tell you what color curtains to
have or whether to have it two stories or three stories. It's a
guideline, it is a road map. It's a kind of guardrail. Doesn't tell
you where to be in the road, but how to prevent you from straying off.

I would say that the Constitution is resolutely irreligious, or
outside of the Christian framework that the founders were working in
with the Declaration and other things. I mean, it really is -- when
people read it, it doesn't have any poetry in it. Right? It's just a
guideline.

DYSON: See, the amendments -- this is why -- I get the point about
the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution. But I would still argue that the amendments to the
Constitution suggest that we are having doubts, skepticism. We are
rethinking, we are trying to include a broader circle of privilege for
those who have been historically locked out. Which means then that the
exclusion of some people and the inclusion of others suggest politics,
negotiation. The document itself, if Rick is right about being a
blueprint for and not telling us what color the curtains are, but it
does suggest that that fundamental document has to be opened up.

WILL: The framers were not narrowed and blinkered men. They were
men of the enlightenment. They believed in progress, to which end they
included in this document an amendment provision. They said there will
be changes made.

The difference is, do you amend the Constitution by the casual weak
interpretation of it, or do you candidly, when you want to change the
structure of the government, change it by the amendment process they
provided?

AMANPOUR: We're going to discuss that after a break and we're going
to discuss some of the specific issues that are being really used in the
political debate right now. So up next, we'll talk about war, taxes,
health care. How does the Constitution address the great issues of our
time? The roundtable weighs in. And later, living the American dream.
The immigrant experience at a crucial crossroads.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

AMANPOUR: You'd be hard pressed to find an American who doesn't see
the Constitution as the foundation of government. But after that,
things get murky. Would the Constitution for instance allow a law
requiring people to buy health insurance? Do Second Amendment gun
rights hold up in the age of the assault weapon? And when the First
Amendment was drafted, could the authors have ever dreamt that one day
it would protect violent video games? Let's bring back our roundtable.

So let's get to some of these specifics, which is so much part of
the conversation around the country today. We touched briefly on health
care. The whole debate about President Obama's health care act is being
called unconstitutional in some quarters. So is that going to be
challenged at the Supreme Court?

WILL: 26 states, more or less, (inaudible) 26 are in various courts
around the country in a case absolutely certain to be decided by the
Supreme Court.

The question is, has the congressional power to regulate interstate
commerce been so loosely construed that now Congress can do anything at
all, that there is nothing it cannot do.

Let me ask the three of you. Obviously, obesity and its costs
affect interstate commerce. Does Congress have the constitutional power
to require obese people to sign up for Weight Watchers? If not, why not?

STENGEL: Justice Vincent's opinion about Obamacare, saying that the
government can't regulate inactivity and that we're stretching the
Commerce Clause too far -- I think it's kind of silly. Everything
having to do with health care does cross state boundaries. Even that
notion of the Commerce Clause as regulating among the states is a kind
of antiquarian idea. The government can ask you to do things. It asks
us to --

WILL: It's not asking us, it's mandating.

STENGEL: It asks us to pay our taxes. It asks us to register for
the draft. It asks us to buy car insurance if we want to drive our car
around.

(CROSSTALK)

WILL: -- to buy a car.

STENGEL: If something is unconstitutional, people out there tend to
think like some alarm will go off if something is unconstitutional.
It's unconstitutional if the Supreme Court decides it's
unconstitutional. And by the way, this can go to the Supreme Court, and
we can see whether that happens.

WILL: Well, does Congress have the power to mandate that obese
people sign up for -- do they have the power to do this?

STENGEL: I don't know the answer to that.

WILL: You don't know.

DYSON: Well, the beauty of that is, the not knowing -- and we can
predict that Rick would say that because he's saying that's the color of
the curtain. The basic foundation is set.

WILL: Is that a yes, Congress does have the power to mandate?

DYSON: It's open. If they decide that they will, they will have
the power to do so.

LEPORE: Can I just sort of offer up a sort of a slightly different
vantage on this question, because I think it's an important one. But I
think, again, just sort of sound the note again, that this debate is
what the Constitution is about. Right? We can have this debate. This
is evidence that the Constitution is working.

AMANPOUR: Let me just ask also, because obviously, so much has
changed and it's obvious to say that, but in 200 years -- could the
framers have ever imagined assault weapons or violent video games or
whatever, when it was written, not in stone, on parchment -- what about
for instance this very contentious Second Amendment, which is also the
hot potato in today's political world? It was for regulated militias,
but also it was also pre -- it was in the time of the musket.

STENGEL: It was. In fact, George Washington, I believe in 1791,
signed a bill asking Americans to buy muskets and buy ammunition. I
think the Second Amendment is one of those issues where the way it's
been interpreted over 200 years affects exactly the way it is now.

I don't know that anybody really knows the exact meaning of the
Second Amendment, in terms of what is absolutely -- what the clear
intent of the framers was. In fact, I would argue that whatever that
was, it's been adapted to this new world that we're living in now. So
if we're talking about the Second Amendment or we're talking about the
War Powers Act, George Washington would not have known what to do about
whether drone warfare qualifies as an act of military engagement and
therefore engages the War Powers Act. The War Powers Act itself may be
unconstitutional. It has never been tested in the Supreme Court.

WILL: In the first decade of the 21st century, that 18th century
amendment, Second Amendment, pertaining to bearing arms, was settled in
this sense -- the Supreme Court finally said, based on extraordinary
scholarship on both sides, that it does protect an individual right, not
the collective right of militias.

The founding fathers didn't know anything about telephones, but they
did say in the fourth Amendment that we should be protected from
unreasonable searches and seizures, and the court applying the values of
the framers, applied that to wiretaps, and a whole set of law has
evolved around that. So the fact that the framers didn't envision a
particular technology by no means disqualifies what they wrote from
being applied to modern conditions.

DYSON: See, here we are agreeing, finally.

(CROSSTALK)

DYSON: Because the point is that they couldn't have anticipated
things that they didn't know existed. So as a result of that, it leaves
-- it's left up to us to interpret what they meant.

See, I think that the Constitution is like the Bible. And some
Christians' relationship to the Bible. Some people are literalists, so
they think every I must be dotted, every T must be crossed, and they
believe in the literal interpretation of the word. Some are more
liberal and progressive in thinking that this is a suggestion about the
moral content of one's identity, that one must not adhere strictly to
that. But we, in light of those constitutional values, can interpret
them and apply them in ways that I think are edifying, and we have to
make arguments about that. We can't assume we know the one-to-one
correlation between the founding fathers, the Constitution and what we
do today.

AMANPOUR: For instance, the First Amendment, the controversial in
some quarters ruling by the Supreme Court this week regarding violent
video games for children. There are many parents who have been sort of
outraged about that, and yet, it's framed in a basic First Amendment
right. Is that an example of something that is obvious? It should be
like that? Or is that also part of the struggle to figure out how to
match 200 years with today?

LEPORE: I think it was important not to collapse the distance
between 200 years and today and to understand all the history that's
come in between the two. There's this great moment, in Franklin's
writings when he says, if I could be preserved in a vat of madeira wine
and be reawakened in 100 or 200 years, I would really like to see how
this country turns out.

AMANPOUR: Wouldn't you also say, and you wrote about this, he was
amazingly perspicacious when this Constitution was signed. He stood up
and he said, well, I don't know whether it's the best, it might be the
best, and because it might be--

LEPORE: A lot of these guys were really -- they were very conscious
of the judgment of posterity. They really thought a lot about how this
document would be understood. We're talking (inaudible) Franklin, who
was going to make a joke about it, you know, talking about madeira wine,
but you know, he did not preserve himself. He is not available for us.
But what he did sort of to make sure to put into the record of the
proceedings on that last day when the Constitution was signed, you know,
this quip about he stole from someone -- always with the jokes -- that
you know, the only difference between the Church of England and the
Church of Rome is that the former is infallible and the latter is never
wrong.

This was Franklin trying to say, we -- I will change my mind. If I
were around long enough -- I am at the end of my years here -- I would
change my mind. And so other people will change their minds, and that
is how this document works.

STENGEL: He said right after that, remember, in that speech, he
said, let us all doubt a little of our own infallibility. That's great
advice for our politics now, because this discussion of the Constitution
that happens between the Tea Party, between progressives, between
everybody, everybody thinks that they have the God's honest truth about
this, that there's absolutely one way of interpreting it. Even
Franklin, the founding, founding father said let us doubt a little of
our own infallibility. That's what the Constitution is for. When
Marshall said, it's basically you have to adapt it to the current times,
he set that in motion for the rest of our history. I think we do have
to adapt it.

AMANPOUR: I want to get your final thoughts through the process of
asking each of you which is your favorite founding father. Who is your
favorite founding father and why?

STENGEL: Well, I would have to say, Madison, because he really was
-- not because he was the shortest founding father -- he was only 5'2 by
the way -- but he really was the architect of the Constitution. And he
tried to balance the more centralized vision of Hamilton and the more
decentralized vision of Jefferson. And because the document ultimately
was and probably is the greatest product of compromise in human history.

AMANPOUR: Compromise, isn't that a word we hear a lot right now?
Jill, your favorite.

LEPORE: Benjamin Franklin's sister, Jean, who on July 4th in 1786,
the 10th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, thinking back
on what the revolution had accomplished, wrote her brother a letter.
She had been reading Richard Price, the English philosopher, political
philosopher, and she said, you know, I think what I've realized is that
in this world, there are very few people who are able to break through
the barriers of poverty and ignorance. There are people, there are
Isaac Newtons all over the world that we'll never hear from.

She I think represents the great lesson of the promise of the
revolutionary era.

DYSON: I would have to say Thomas Jefferson. I mean, in his life,
the genius of self-individualized (ph) expression. The incredible
contributions of the Declaration of Independence, though he didn't want
it to be in any way revised. Redactors prevailed. His commitment to
the flourishing of democracy, despite his own individual flaws, and I
think the beauty of his being tethered to Sally Hemmings, is at the end
of the day, after all the ink, and the parchment, and the abstract
discourse, it's about flesh, it's about engagement, it's about the lived
realities. And Sally Hemmings' flesh and her lived reality are in part
responsible for us understanding the arc and the beauty and the luminous
intensity of the documents we have and the contradictions we must live
with in order to realize them. So I think Thomas Jefferson.

WILL: The framer who towers over all the rest is Little Thomas,
little James Madison. Someone said of him never so much a high ratio of
mind to mass. And the argument we're having today is whether James
Madison, of the Princeton class of 1771, can save the Constitution from
Woodrow Wilson of the Princeton class of 1879 and the progressive
movement. It's an intramural argument at Princeton.

AMANPOUR: Thank you all so much. That was very enlightening. And
up next, will the melting pot boil over? Grappling with the immigrant
experience as demographics change and politics struggle to keep up.

IMMIGRATION PANEL

AMANPOUR: They are words that every American and many immigrants
know by heart, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free."

Those lines inscribed on the Statue of Liberty greeted new
immigrants at the dawn of the last century, and now the conversation has
changed, and so has this melting-pot nation.

Today's newcomers are not being welcomed with open arms. The new
immigration wave presents unforeseen challenges but also unexpected
opportunities.

And joining me to discuss the way forward, George Will, Michelle
Rhee, the former D.C. schools chancellor and founder of the group
Students First. She is a first-generation American. Mel Martinez, the
former Florida senator and one-time chairman of the Republican National
Committee. He emigrated from Cuba as a boy. And Jose Antonio Vargas, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for The Washington Post who
recently published an article acknowledging that he's an illegal immigrant.

Thank you all for being with me today.

Let me go to you first. About two weeks ago you've written this
article basically coming out as an illegal. What were you trying to
accomplish?

I mean, it's a pretty risky strategy.

VARGAS: Risky and, a lot of people have said, like, irrational. In
many ways, the goal was to expose just how incredibly dysfunctional and
irrational the whole system is and has been for quite some time.

You know, in many ways, I represent, kind of, as with a lot of
people, just how broken the immigration system is. And we've never,
this country, Republicans, Democrat, journalists, I think, have yet to,
kind of, come to one table and tell the truth about where we are about
this issue.

AMANPOUR: You spent most of your youth basically lying about it...

VARGAS: Yes.

AMANPOUR: ... having to lie, deciding to lie about it, even when
you were a reporter. And at one point, you were told you were illegal.
You didn't know that, actually?

VARGAS: No. I mean, I found out. Like a lot of undocumented, you
know, youths who come to this country, I didn't find out until I was 16
years old and went to the DMV to get a driver's permit. That's when I
found out.

And...

(LAUGHTER)

... the first instinct was, you know, don't let anybody think that
I'm not American. And thank God for television. That's how I learned
how to speak American...

(LAUGHTER)

... you know, like, learned slang and figured out that I needed to
read The New Yorker and Newsweek and Time magazine, you know, to, kind
of, assimilate and adapt even further.

AMANPOUR: Senator Martinez, you're obviously working on this
issue. You're trying to achieve something rational in the immigration
reform. You just heard what Jose said, that it's an irrational
situation. Is it?

MARTINEZ: Well, it really is. I mean, we have a lot of people who
have lived in our country for many, many years, some of them brought
here as youths, as Jose's example.

The fact is that we have a system that hasn't really been working
either for Americans or for the poor immigrant people that may be in
this country in a way that want to just become Americans.

AMANPOUR: Mayor Bloomberg has called the lack of immigration reform
and particularly with the more highly skilled people, sort of, national
suicide. Is there a route to changing this now in today's political
climate?

MARTINEZ: Well, I think perhaps a piecemeal approach could be
obtained, and there's some things we need to do just for the good of our
country, for the good of our economy.

You know, we have a tremendous shortage of people in the high-tech
fields, the STEMs, as we call them, science, technology and mathematics,
where we really need people from other countries who are learning these
skills to be able to come here and create jobs.

So creating numbers that are adequate to fill the demand is
something that we ought to do at any -- it's good for America. We ought
to just do it.

AMANPOUR: Michelle, let me ask you, on a very human level, somebody
like Jose got through because his teachers -- some of them knew; some of
them had to lie to protect him, or at least not tell the truth.

How difficult is it for educators around the country right now when
faced with situations like Jose's?

RHEE: I think it's very difficult. Because, as educators and as,
you know, public employees, people know that they have certain
responsibilities to the government.

But at the same time, our primary responsibility as educators is to
the children and ensuring that we are -- are acting within the best
interests of the kids that we are serving.

And, you know, when you look at it from a very humanistic
standpoint, you have so many teachers out there who are teaching kids;
they may know that some of them are illegal immigrants and -- but you
see, sort of, what the kid needs, what the potential of these children
are, and you just want to make sure that they're taught properly and
that they -- you know, they can move forward to be successful.

And so that's, I think, the mindset that most -- most educators and
most teachers in this country have.

AMANPOUR: What was it like for you to be here, your parents from
South Korea? I mean, how did you assimilate?

RHEE: You know, for me, it was -- it was very interesting. But I
think it was probably also very similar to what most immigrant kids
experience, which was, sort of, living in two different worlds.

My parents left South Korea and, sort of, wanted to raise us in the
world that they had been raised in. And one of the things I find very
interesting is that my cousins who grew up in Korea are more liberal and
were raised in, you know, much less a conservative way than we were,
because Korea was moving along.

In my parents' mind, though, Korea stayed the exact same, and that's
how they raised us, in the Korea that they grew up in.

And so that -- there was a very stark difference between their
mindset of what kids should -- should do and be like, versus what my
friends were experiencing every day.

AMANPOUR: George, when we've discussed immigration, you have an
issue with the idea of assimilation, compared to the first waves of
immigration here to today.

WILL: Well, a century ago, we were undergoing, in 1911, a torrent
of immigration. But there are big differences.

First of all, they came across the Atlantic Ocean, which served, as
has been said, as a kind of psychological guillotine. It severed people
from where they came from, so they looked into America and said, we're
going to become Americans.

It's very different when you are the only developed nation in the
world with a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation. And people can
walk across and go back and send money back. There's no, again,
severing of the connection to the old country.

Second, back in 1911, our economy could absorb an almost unlimited
wave of unskilled labor. The American economy is very different now.
And there's another problem. I don't know how to quantify this, and
it's hard to measure, but today immigrants are emigrating into a welfare
state. We don't know the extent to which -- it's hard to measure -- but
to some extent, this may be a magnet to people coming to this country
for different reasons.

MARTINEZ: But I would say, George, that part of that problem, in
breaking ties, is not being allowed to become an American.

(CROSSTALK)

MARTINEZ: I was, because I came legally and...

AMANPOUR: You came in '62 from Cuba?

MARTINEZ: In '62, right, right, under political circumstances. But
at the end of the day, I became an American, because this is a welcoming
place, and because I felt I was part of America, once I made that
threshold and crossed the path.

AMANPOUR: I mean, I'm a direct beneficiary of being an immigrant,
getting the H-1 visa after having been in college here.

But I think the debate also and the, sort of, view is, kind of,
shifting here in the United States.

I'm struck, George, by something that Benjamin Johnson of the
American Immigration Council told The Washington Post. Basically, he
said that "Too often the immigration debate looks like and is driven by
images on television of people jumping over the fences" -- as you
mentioned, that 2,000 mile border. But, in fact, a new Brookings report
has said that, for the first time, highly skilled immigrants are now
outnumbering low-skilled or unskilled people coming over here. It's
shifting.

WILL: And we should have more of them. An enormous portion of the
people who are seeking advanced degrees in science, technology,
engineering and mathematics are from overseas. They come to our
wonderful universities. We equip them to add value to our economy and
then deport them.

It's madness. Every American advanced degree should come with a
green card stapled to it. Let them stay.

AMANPOUR: On the political level, then, how does -- and on the
social level, too, how does this country grapple with that quite
startling fact, that, in 2050, it will be a majority minority country?

MARTINEZ: Well, I think the demographic changes are not followed
immediately by political change. I've seen it happen in Florida.
Florida has become a very demographically different state than it was in
1962 when I got there. And the change comes slowly. I was reading
about whether in California there will be as many Hispanic majority
districts in the new congress as a resort to reapportionment as there
should be.

And, you know, the political system tends to hold on, an
incompetency and things like that. So I think it does come slowly and
it is undoubtedly part of the change of the future.

AMANPOUR: And Michelle, you know, one often thinks, and certainly
when you talk to people about immigration and precisely this kind of
statistic. People here tend to think that it is about illegal
immigration, that because these numbers exploding, it's because of
illegal, but apparently it's not. It's about immigration, legal and
also the birth explosion here.

RHEE: That's right. And I think we have to find a way to see the
positive in this. You know, in the next 20 years in this country, we
are going to have 125 million high skill, high-paid jobs. And at the
rate that the current public education system is going, we're only going
to be able to produce 50 million American kids whose have the kills and
knowledge to take those jobs. That means that we are talking about, you
know, potentially outsourcing the rest of those jobs, the majority of
those jobs overseas.

Why wouldn't be we look at our immigration policy and ensure that
those people that George was talking about who are coming into the
country, who are taking advantage of our institutions of higher ed, that
we keep them here. The -- you know, illegal immigrants even, I've seen
children who graduated from DCPS, who are actually incredibly talented
at math and science not able to go on to college because they couldn't
fill out their FAFSA forms, et cetera.

Why wouldn't we take advantage of that talent to solve some of our
problems long term?

AMANPOUR: And meantime, in this area of global competition,
students from other countries, are upping their graduation rate as here
they're sort of declining.

George, what then is politically possible to try to address some of
these very real problems?

WILL: The first thing you have to do is secure the borders. A
secure border is not a weird aspiration, it's an essential attribute of
national sovereignty. Once you do that, and the American people think
you've done it, they will be -- they're not xenophobic, they're not
anti-immigrant, they just say let's establish order and then we'll come
to terms with this.

Then you can tell them the following, suppose there are 11 million
-- we don't know within a million how many -- suppose there are 11
million illegal immigrants here, I did the arithmetic. To depart them
would require not just police measures, we'd never tolerate. The
majority have been here five years or more, they've had children here,
the children are citizens. But to depart them would require a line of
buses bumper to bumper extending from San Diego to Alaska.

Not going to happen.

And as soon as people come to terms with that, then we'll get on
with settling...

MARTINEZ: And George, the cost of due process, too, because they would
cost would be enormous.

AMANPOUR: And last thought. Immigration is the very essence of
this country. People all over the world look at this country yearning,
how to rationalize that immense strength of the United States, with this
issue right now, the political security, and other issues?

RHEE: Well, I mean, I think that every, everyone has an immigration
story. From way back in your family's history to somebody that you know
and care about. And I feel like part of what would have to happen, we
have to humanize this. We have to know that the majority of this point
deporting all of those people, the impact that would have in terms of
breaking up families, there isn't a parent anywhere who would say that
that makes sense to do.

And I think to the extent that we can begin to humanize this and
handle it in sort of a rational way of understanding what has to happen,
securing the border, having a rational policy for these 11 million
illegal immigrants and a path to
legal status, I mean, we just -- we just need to understand the human
aspect of this.

AMANPOUR: Well, the human aspect is sitting right here. Jose, what
should happen to him?

VARGAS: Well, let me just say, by way. We're talking to two people
who have made common sense. I mean, I remember reading a column of
yours in '06 where the headline was like, guard the borders and face the
facts too. I mean, today we're not facing the facts on this issue. I
remember interviewing with RNC, you know, when I was still a reporter,
and the question was, how are Republicans going to deal with this issue?

Like this is not an abstraction, I mean, these are people who are
very much woven into the fabric of our lives in every possible class.

WILL: Let me give you another reason why we need immigrants not
just for the work force that you're talking about, when we started
Social Security, there were 42 workers for every retiree. Today we're
were down to three point some. The Baby Boomers have all retired to
Florida in 2030, we'll be down to 2.1. We need, and the Social Security
trustee's report assumes, a continuing high level of immigration to
replenish the work force to make the entitlement system work.

AMANPOUR: So what should happen, last word to Jose. Here he is
sitting illegally.

MARTINEZ: Difficult problem. And I think what we need to do is to
find a way in which Jose can contribute to this country. He wants to be
an American. This is a great thing. This is Fourth of July. We need to
talk about the fact that this is a country that people still yearn to
come to. People love this country and when they come here, they get
invested in America. They want to become Americans. Allow this man to
become an American just like we've done with so many people who served
in our military. You know, one of the moving things is to hear about
ceremonies in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the Fourth of July where
Americans who are there, not American, illegal immigrants who are now
becoming Americans as a result of their service to our country.

So there's many ways to serve our country. Allow these people to
serve. I think it would be to America's enrichment.

AMANPOUR: On that note, thank you all so much.

And when we return, struggling to save the American dream as Wall
Street pulls in record profit Main Street tries to survive. And the gap
between rich and poor grows even wider. We take you to one city that's
fighting back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

AMANPOUR: For millions of Americans, this year's Fourth of July
will be bittersweet. In a gloomy economy, the great dreams of home
ownership and financial solvency are slipping further and further out of
reach. And cities like Pontiac Michigan are seeing a steady erosion of
the middle class.

Now Pontiac is trying to fight back against increasingly difficult
odds. Here's ABC's Jim Sciutto.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JIM SCIUTTO, ABC NEWS CORRESPONDENT: At the shuttered GM site in
Pontiac, Michigan padlocks outside, dead plants in the lobby, belongings
left behind, everything but the people. It's a city full of empty
monuments to its heyday: a truck plant now dark, and early 5,000 vacant
homes, shops and businesses.

Today unemployment stands at 25% in Pontiac's once burgeoning middle
class is, some fear, going the way of its namesake car.

Sam Carter Junior bought his house when he had a steady income and
steady job.

SAM CARTER, JR: I got ten year in the company, so I'm thinking I'm
going be there a while.

SCIUTTO: But in 2009, he lost his job and had to spend his entire
401(k) just to keep his house. When he did find work again after more
than a year, his wages dropped to $11 from $16 an hour.

CARTER: I'm building a whole other retirement plan again.

SCIUTTO: Starting over at the age of....

CARTER: 50.

SCIUTTO: In what was once a vibrant city automaking city, the tall
grass in the front yard is the tell tale sign. People who lost their
jobs, then their houses. You see this up and down so many streets in
Pontiac. And speak to the residents here, and they don't believe the
jobs or their neighbors are ever coming
back.

Francis Davis taught at a nearby charter school then she lost her
job and her house.

You're a dedicated teacher, educated. Never thought this would happen?

FRANCIS DAVID: No, not at all. Not at all.

SCIUTTO: Out of work for two years now, she's interviewing for
anything.

DAVIS: I have looked at people, you know, you're not working.
There's a million jobs out here. It's really not easy. Not at all.

SCIUTTO: You looked at them in the past and say, you can get a job.

DAVIS: Oh, yeah. If i ever lost my job, I was just so sure that it
would never be a problem for me to find something, something.

SCIUTTO: The loss of jobs and businesses has wreaked havoc. When
the plants were running, Pontiac City budget was in in surplus, now it's
in the red.

Leon Jukowski is Pontiac's mayor in name only. He has no staff, no
pay check, and no budgetary power.

LEON JUKOWSKI, MAYOR OF PONTIAC, MICHIGAN: I get most of my
information at this point about what's happening in city government from
the newspapers.

SCIUTTO: The new Pontiac is run by Michael Stampler, the emergency
financial manager, appointed by the state. He's even proposed shutting
the city down and folding it into the county to save money.

Still, there are scattered signs of hope here. On the site of that
old GM plant there's a new movie lot and a new film production.

This weekend, there won't be any Fourth of July fireworks, but
Pontiac's all-American spirit isn't broken.

Do you think thinks are going to get better? That it's going to get
easier?

DAVIS: Yes, because what is the alternative for me to fail, and
that's not happening. So -- and I have a 13-year-old, and there's no
way. As hard as she works, I can't stop.

SCIUTTO: For This Week I'm Jim Sciutto, ABC News, Pontiac, Michigan.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: More of our special edition when we come back. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

AMANPOUR: And now, the Sunday funnies.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BACHMANN: Everything I need to know, I learned in Iowa.

STEPHEN COLBERT, COLBERT REPORT: Remember, she left Iowa at age
12. And has had the courage not to learn anything since.

CONAN O'BRIEN, LATE NIGHT WITH CONAN O'BRIEN: Reverend Pat
Robertson said that if more states legalize gay marriage, God will
destroy America. Yeah. On the plus side, he admitted that gays will
then come in and do a beautiful renovation, absolutely gorgeous.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is he likely to become the anti-Romney candidate
for the Republicans.

JON STEWART, THE DAILY SHOW: The anti-Romney. He's a handsome,
Mormon ex-governor with perceived softness on social issues. He's not
the anti-Romney, he's the candidate for people who would vote for Romney
but are concerned Romney has too much name recognition.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: More when we return, so stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

AMANPOUR: And now In Memoriam.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's a long ways -- they won it!

AMANPOUR: We remember all of those who died in war this week. The
Pentagon released the names of these service members killed in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

AMANPOUR: That's our program today. And remember, you can follow
me any time on Facebook, Twitter and ABCNews.com.

And be sure to watch World News with David Muir this evening.

For all of us here at This Week have a very good holiday weekend,
and thanks for watching.